Tag Archives: remove

Broken packages are mess! I recently installed MariaDB to give it a try. After testing, I decided to uninstall it for now and maybe come back later. I was careless while removing MariaDB and ended up messing MySQL configs (MariaDB runs on top of MySQL). Things were only to get worse from here. A high priority task pops up that requires me to access MySQL. Unable to access it, I decide to completely remove MySQL and do a fresh install – basically a hard reset. If only things were that simple in real world. By this time my MariaDB was half removed, MySQL configs were a mess and I was now about to remove MySQL completely. Here’s what happened:

Alright, maybe I did not uninstall MariaDB correctly. Lets try removing that once more:

Same error! Ok, I clearly screwed MySQL. I should try installing it back. Lets see how that goes:

Unmet dependencies? Ok! I know what to do in such cases:

Nothing! That’s scary. There’s no way forward (installing) and there’s no way backward (uninstalling). I am basically stuck!

Maybe autoclean is a good idea? Sadly no difference.

I noticed both MySQL and MariaDB remove commands were exiting because of ‘mysql-server-5.6’, so fixing it was my best bet. I also noticed the error raised while removing mysql-server was from file `/var/lib/dpkg/info/mysql-server-5.6.postrm` as evident in following line:

/var/lib/dpkg/info/mysql-server-5.6.postrm: line 53: /usr/share/mysql-common/configure-symlinks: No such file or directory

So what if I comment the line that’s raising this error? Risky, but desperate times – desperate measures. After creating a backup of the file, I edited it to remove the line that raised the error and retried. Here’s what happened :

Finally! Editing the file worked and I was able to remove both packages. Next I fresh installed mysql-server and it worked perfectly. What a relief! 🙂